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Genetic diversity of bottlenose dolphin (Tursiops sp.) populations in the western North Pacific and the conservation implications

Chen, Ing; Nishida, Shin; Yang, Wei-Cheng; Isobe, Tomohiko; Tajima, Yuko; Hoelzel, A. Rus

Genetic diversity of bottlenose dolphin (Tursiops sp.) populations in the western North Pacific and the conservation implications Thumbnail


Authors

Ing Chen

Shin Nishida

Wei-Cheng Yang

Tomohiko Isobe

Yuko Tajima



Abstract

The evolutionary processes that shape patterns of diversity in highly mobile marine species are poorly understood, but important towards transferable inference on their effective conservation. In this study, bottlenose dolphins (Tursiops sp.) are studied to address this broader question. They exhibit remarkable geographical variation for morphology, life history, and genetic diversity, and this high level of variation has made the taxonomy of the genus controversial. A significant population structure has been reported for the most widely distributed species, the common bottlenose dolphin (T. truncatus), in almost all ocean basins, though no data have been available for the western North Pacific Ocean (WNP). The genetic diversity of bottlenose dolphins in the WNP was investigated based on 20 microsatellite and one mitochondrial DNA markers for samples collected from Taiwanese, Japanese, and Philippine waters (9°–39°N, 120°–140°E) during 1986–2012. The results indicated that there are at least four genetically differentiated populations of common bottlenose dolphins in the western and central North Pacific Ocean. The pattern of differentiation appears to correspond to habitat types, resembling results seen in other populations of the same species. Our analyses also showed that there was no evident gene flow between the two “sister species”, the common bottlenose dolphins, and the Indo-Pacific bottlenose dolphins (T. aduncus) occurring sympatrically in our study region.

Citation

Chen, I., Nishida, S., Yang, W., Isobe, T., Tajima, Y., & Hoelzel, A. R. (2017). Genetic diversity of bottlenose dolphin (Tursiops sp.) populations in the western North Pacific and the conservation implications. Marine Biology, 164(10), Article 202. https://doi.org/10.1007/s00227-017-3232-8

Journal Article Type Article
Acceptance Date Aug 29, 2017
Online Publication Date Sep 11, 2017
Publication Date Sep 11, 2017
Deposit Date Sep 15, 2017
Publicly Available Date Mar 28, 2024
Journal Marine Biology
Print ISSN 0025-3162
Electronic ISSN 1432-1793
Publisher Springer
Peer Reviewed Peer Reviewed
Volume 164
Issue 10
Article Number 202
DOI https://doi.org/10.1007/s00227-017-3232-8

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http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/

Copyright Statement
This article is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons license, and indicate if changes were made.





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